QR-bill: why we are separating your addresses now

The transition period for the new QR-bill ends on 30 September 2026. Good news first: nothing about the format of your Vinosoft invoices has to change — we have written the structured address into the QR code from the start. What we improved is the quality of what goes into those fields.

What the deadline is actually about

Version 2.3 of the Implementation Guidelines took effect on 22 November 2025: the Swiss QR Code now accepts the structured address only. In it, every element sits in its own field — street, house number, postal code, town and country, each kept apart. The combined address, which carried the whole postal address as one block of free text, has been abolished. Until 30 September 2026 payments carrying the old addresses are mostly still processed; after that you should not count on it.

Vinosoft was never exposed to this: the QR code we print on your invoices has always used the structured form. You do not have to change anything to meet the deadline.

Where it went wrong anyway

The QR code wants street and house number as two separate fields. Vinosoft, however, always stored the address as one line: Bahnhofstrasse 12. So at print time the software had to take that line apart itself — and that guess goes wrong surprisingly often:

• Rue de la Gare has no house number at all. The guess lops off the last word and writes Rue de la into the QR code. The street is now wrong.
• 12a, 12-14, 5 bis are perfectly valid house numbers that do not look like a plain number.
• Postfach 1234 contains a number, but not a house number.

In the standard, street and house number are optional fields — an incomplete entry does not invalidate your bill. A wrong one is still a nuisance: it sits in the QR code, on the payment part, and on every document your customer reads. And for payments made over the counter, a complete, correctly separated address is what counts.

So Vinosoft now has a dedicated house number field — on client, supplier and licensee addresses, on contacts, and in the shop checkout. Where it is filled, nothing is guessed any more: the value goes into the QR code exactly as you entered it. Everything you create from now on is correctly separated from the start.

A welcome side effect: because street and house number are now held apart, Vinosoft prints them in the order each country actually uses. Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy keep Bahnhofstrasse 12 — for the United Kingdom, the United States or France it becomes 12 Bahnhofstrasse, the way it belongs on the envelope there.

Bringing your existing addresses across

That leaves the addresses you have collected over the years, where the house number still sits inside the street line. There is a dedicated page that does most of that work for you:

Split your addresses now →

The page lists every affected address and proposes a split for each one. Here is how to work through it:

1. Open the page. You get the street line as it is stored today, next to the proposed street and house number.
2. Check the proposals. Both fields are editable right there — where the proposal is off, correct it in the row.
3. Filter by country if you want to clear the Swiss addresses first, or search for a particular street.
4. Accept a row with Accept — or tick several and accept them in one go.

The list is grouped by country and street. The same street usually appears many times in your data — on the company, on its delivery address, on every contact. You decide once, and Vinosoft writes the split to every address in that group. Each row tells you how many addresses that covers.

Good to know: nothing changes until you accept a row. Addresses that already have a separate house number never show up in the list. And where the number happens to sit at the start of the line, Vinosoft flags the row — give those a second look.

Address copies stored on documents you have already issued are left alone at first: those are snapshots of past paperwork. If you want to clean them up too, tick Include address copies stored on documents at the top.

What to do now

Set aside half an hour. For most businesses the list is empty after a handful of clicks — and from then on every payment part carries the address you actually entered, instead of the one a guess made of it.

Questions about the changeover? Talk to our team or send us feedback.